Post #667536 by Hale Tiki on Sat, Feb 16, 2013 8:50 AM

On 2013-02-11 19:37, zerostreet wrote:

On 2013-02-11 17:38, Hale Tiki wrote:

On 2013-02-11 15:36, zerostreet wrote:
Thanks everyon! Not a bad idea Hale Tiki....a barrel pendant!

Indeed. Dig the mug, can't wait to see the colors. If you want, I can take a casting of the final mug, and shrink it down to pendant size, without having to do any re-sculpting, or any loss of detail.

I have to send the sculpt off to Eekum Bookum when it's done. Curious as to how you would do that though.

Oh no, not the final sculpt, but a mug. You wouldn't lose much detail after it's glazed. It's quite simple, actually. There's two different ways of doing it. One is to mix an evaporative agent in with the platinum silicone when you're pouring the mold. The silicone dries after approx 16 hours, and you carefully remove the piece that you've molded. Then, over the next week, the agent, which is mixed in at a microscopic level, evaporates from the mold. The mold then shrinks approx 25-50%, depending on how much you've mixed, and how long you let it dry. Repeat until you get the desired size. It's time/materials intensive, but it works. You can also enlarge an object by soaking a regular silicone mold in the same material for approx two weeks. Then you can get one or two pulls, depending on your casting material, before the mold begins to shrink. Again, you lose absolutely no detail. The second way is a bit more complicated, but shrinks a bit more, and produces a positive that can either be re-cast to make the piece smaller, or can be cleaned and painted as a final object. In this instance, the shrunken mold would be used to cast the final pieces in a fast cast urethane resin, or the shrunken down positive would then be used to create a new mold, which the fast cast resin would be poured into. It's a lot easier than it sounds, so long as you have the right equipment/knowledge/patience. It's the kind of thing I do all the time at work. I've got some birdman moai that were actually carved by the people of Rapa Nui that I've been working on shrinking down to 5% of their original size for quite some time now.